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According to the Bologna Directives teaching at Swedish Colleges and Universities should be outcomes-based rather than content-based. Inspired by the assessment principles involved in setting grades for art education portfolios, professor Peter Gill at the University of Gävle has developed a model of educational assessment matrices, the purpose of which is to clarify the procedures involved in assessing educational tasks by focussing on learning outcomes. However, the implementation of this initiative has been met with certain difficulties. Intended users have lacked a common conceptual framework and have expressed a reluctance to embrace a scoring system that requires congruence between aggregated subjective judgements and Bologna grades. One reason may be that the underlying epistemological assumptions are difficult to clarify. A further reason is also postulated on the basis of epistemological collisions between different ideological positions. The following text takes as its starting point observed misunderstandings concerning the nature of intuitive authentic assessment as well as practical experience of making use of such assessment procedures. The article argues for the use of clarifying and systematizing the assessment principles in order to increase methodological transparency for students and colleagues. It is also argued that implementing such assessment strategies provides improved possibilities for pedagogical and didactical development.

3. Conceptualizing concepts

Andrén, Maria

University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Educational Sciences, Education.

Within the scientific community, methodological concepts occupy a central position. Many students devote much effort trying to learn "correct" meanings for the concepts with which they come in contact. Another way to approach what might be termed ‘ontology of conceptualization’ is to study how concepts are used. The subject of this investigation is an exploration of the use of some methodological concepts as they arise in academic dissertations. In the theses that were studied it was found that concepts are not used coherently in a lexical sense. While use may be consistent with knowledge claims as they are elucidated in the texts, there is a need to distinguish what is being described in terms of the use of concepts from other possible meaning-options. A didactic conclusion from this analysis is that the teaching of research methodology will be more successful when it focuses on differences between concepts and how they are presented and used in given research contexts, rather than attempting to providing general all-encompassing definitions.

4. Det pedagogiska övervägandet – om att utveckla pedagogisk klokhet

Andrén, Maria

University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Educational Sciences, Education.

The basic assumption underlying this study is that in completing any pedagogical task there is always an aesthetic dimension involved. Three archetypal pedagogical approaches are enacted and examined by focusing on pedagogical activity as a form of Art. The examples are constructed in order to explicate pedagogically “problematic” approaches. The purpose is to understand and enlighten the pedagogical impact of certain behaviors by the using of aesthetic analysis. One suggested result of the study will be to show how hard, or impossible, it is to distinguish between aspects of content and form in any pedagogical process. Another suggested conclusion will be to show how enhanced awareness of, and reflection on, aesthetic considerations in pedagogical contexts usually deemed "non-aesthetic" might serve a useful tool in professional pedagogical development as a teacher.

6. Risk and pleasure in health promotion

Björklund, Erika

University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Educational Sciences, Education.

One of the perpetual issues in health promotion is the issue of compliance. Researchers and practitioners work to understand and identify the mechanisms and find the magic formula for how to achieve that long-term compliance regarding healthy behavior. Since the poststructuralist ‘linguistic turn', language has come to be conceived as performative (rather than representational) and as such is also of great interest in education as a central aspect of learning: language has come to be perceived as central to our way of understanding our world, and how we understand our world may be perceived as central to how we come to act in this world. Hence, how health is talked about may be expected to have an impact on behavior, on compliance. When the notion of ‘health' is discussed, in research and by lay-people, it is often described by using binaries such as health/disease, healthy/unhealthy, risk/resource, etc. In a study on health promotion initiatives in the workplace (Björklund 2008), another binary emerged: risk/pleasure. By drawing on Derrida's notion of différance to interrogate the binary of risk/pleasure this paper seeks to deconstruct this notion of health. This deconstruction exposes expectations that are placed on the recipients of health promotion initiatives. The analysis also illustrates the dialectical relationship between risk and pleasure and explores inclusive spaces for understanding other ways of thinking about health.

7. Teaching employees to “do” health and wellness

Björklund, Erika

University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Educational Sciences, Education.

General description of research questions, objectives and theoretical framework

This paper takes issue with corporate concern for shaping and governing employees’ health and wellness. Corporations have long been concerned with employee health, but this concern has shifted from a focus on occupational health and safety to include individual health and wellbeing (Bjurvald 2004, Björklund 2008). This is much in line with neo-liberal developments in the public health field internationally in which the advance of a culture of risk has resulted in individuals needing to become self-regulating and self-forming (Turner 1997). This focus on individual health and wellbeing through self-regulation and self-formation has resulted in the development of various health promoting interventions, for instance in the workplace. Workplace health promotion interventions have been described as a two-edged sword (Lupton 1995, but see also for instance Allender, Colquhoun & Kelly 2006a, 2006b and Maravelias 2009, 2012), meaning that interventions and programs concerned with employee health signal philanthropic motives on the part of the employers at the same time as they signal a control over employees’ bodies, exhorting them to engage in specific activities and not others in their spare time. Health promotion in the workplace thus serves to foster a culture of health consciousness and a desire to lead a healthy life, teaching employees what, how and why they should do in order to become happy and fulfilled with their lives and thus be more desirable employees.

As part of a discursive trend, workplace health promotion is being organized and governed on a European level by for instance a European Network for Workplace Health Promotion (ENWHP). The network aims at promoting good practice in workplace health promotion in all European countries, defining workplace health promotion as “the combined efforts of employers, employees and society to improve the health and well-being of people at work” (ENWHP 1997/2007:2). Basic network consensus on goals, vision and mission are recorded in policy documents, or declarations. For example, in the Luxembourg Declaration (ENWHP 1997/2007), implementing policies and practices that enhance employee health by making the healthy choices the easy choices is encouraged. The Luxembourg Declaration also points to important actions for improving workplace health, one of which involves promoting active participation. In an ever more health focused and neo-liberal society, corporations have started to introduce wellness inspirers into the workplace. A wellness inspirer is a regular employee who receives a couple of days of training in order to, besides their regular work duties, also function as an inspirer to help develop healthier lifestyle habits among the staff. The introduction of wellness inspirers to help advance employees’ health and wellness can hence be regarded as an example of promoting active participation among employees, and in this manner, wellness inspirers function as a technology of workplace health promotion. The purpose of this paper is therefore to explore how this phenomenon of wellness inspirers and their role in the workplace and workplace health promotion are discursively construed and operate to govern employees’ health and wellness.

Methods/methodology

The study is based on empirical data in the form of student theses and organization reports and evaluations on workplace health promotion with a specific focus on wellness inspirers. Original student theses were searched in DiVA which is an open database and archive for research publications and student theses produced in Sweden. The search term “hälsoinspiratör” (“wellness inspirer”) was used. Searches were also performed using the same search term on Scholar Google to find reports and evaluations from organizations using wellness inspirers. Out of a total of 103 references, 29 publications were selected.

The publications used were then analyzed using discourse theory, guided by Foucault’s (1978/2003) notion of governmentality. In Rose’s (1999:20) words, governmentality is to analyze “what authorities of various sorts wanted to happen, in relation to problems defined how, in pursuit of what objectives, through what strategies and techniques”. In this study, this relates to the discursive constructions of wellness inspirers, their responsibilities and organization which were analyzed in relation to the techniques for governing that the discourses produced in the name of health and wellness. What discourses were mobilized and what practices for governing of the self and others did those discourses produce?

Expected outcomes/results

The findings show a high degree of consistency between different organizations and different parts of the country regarding how the wellness inspirer was constituted. The wellness inspirer generally had a network of other wellness inspirers to turn to but was also expected to be self-sufficient in producing activities and inspiring co-workers, making it somewhat of a solitary endeavor. In the studied material, the wellness inspirer is also depicted as someone who offers inspiration, energy and good spirits. In this description of the wellness inspirer – or the expectations placed on the wellness inspirer – health and wellbeing is conceived as something that can be imparted upon and shared with people by the means of mere good cheer.

8. Using governmentality to understand subjectification in workplace health promotion

Björklund, Erika

University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Educational Sciences, Education.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to current discussions about criticisms aimed at the analytical concept of governmentality. To do this, I draw on my thesis work, in which the purpose was to explore how “the healthy employee” was constituted in four different workplace health promotion interventions, and how technologies of power and of the self were employed to invite the participants to govern themselves and others. As such, the paper starts with a brief summary of the study, followed by a description of how the concept of governmentality was drawn on in the study. After that review, the paper goes on to address some of the strengths and weaknesses of how the concept was drawn on in this specific work.

9. Troubling the Notion of the ‘Stone Age’ in Health Promotion

Björklund, Erika

et al.

University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Educational Sciences, Education.

This paper describes and discusses how gender is constituted in a Swedish workplace health promotion intervention which focused on diet and physical activity, through the resources of what we have called a ‘Stone Age’ discourse. The paper draws on material gathered for a larger study that examined how discourses of health are contextualized in educational practice and interaction between educators and participants in four different workplace health promotion interventions. The purpose of the interventions was to help employees change (improve) their lifestyle as concerns dietary and physical activity habits. Data was collected for the original study by ethnographic methods such as participation observation of the interaction between educators and participants. Foucault’s ideas about governmentality were utilized in analyzing the interactions in order to investigate how health discourses were drawn on and the technologies of power and of the self by which the participants were governed and invited to govern themselves in the name of health. From these analyses, various discourses were identified on which the participants and particularly the educators drew to constitute the healthy employee. One of these was a discourse, which in this paper is called a ‘Stone Age’ discourse, because of the ways in which the differences in men and women’s health were explained in its most overt form by reference to women as gatherers and men as hunters, with men as a result positioned as the physically, emotionally and mentally ideal and women as the problematic and lacking ‘Other’. While this discourse, in this form, may be unique to Scandinavian countries, this paper will nevertheless indicate how this notion corresponds to ideas from evolutionary theory and medicine in international research on health and wellness. This paper will also discuss the implications of such ideas about health and gender for interventions aimed at changing behavior and lifestyles. The paper will provide a discussion of the specific rationalities, truths and techniques that informed the 'Stone Age' discourse, as these contributed to shaping desires, actions and beliefs.

Sweden has a low prevalence of bullying and Swedish schools are legally obliged to have anti-bullying policies. Many commercial programs are available. A mixed methods, quasi-experimental, concurrent evaluation of 8 programs, chosen from a pool of 21 widely used anti-bullying programs, was planned. Preliminary data, based on 835 stakeholder interviews, both individual and group, revealed extensive program-contamination in "treatment" schools (n = 31), and extensive program use in nominally designated control/comparison schools (n = 8). An evolved evaluation strategy focused on arrays of program components, use of which was assessed through detailed qualitative data gathered from principals, teaching and non-teaching staff, anti-bullying teams, and pupils. Bullying victimization, Grades 4-9, in 39 schools, was assessed by questionnaire, administered in three waves. Responserates were 76.1% (with N = 10,919) at the first wave, 74.3% (of 10,660) at the second wave, and

70.6% (of 10,523) at the final wave. Longitudinal aggregate and individual outcomes (3,487 pupils answered all three questionnaires) were assessed. Prevalence of victimization was 8.1% at first wave and (7.4% at last). Based on individual data, persistent victimization (bullied at both waves) was estimated at 1.5% with 4.7% experiencing a worsening situation (not bullied at the first wave but bullied at last) and 4.8% with an improved situation. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to designate intervention types (shared arrays of strong, weak, or absent component use) and schools with similar approaches. A quasi-experimental, longitudinal design with individual data and an aggregate cross-sectional follow-up indicated differences in effective, ineffective, and iatrogenic components, component clusters (intervention types), and successful schools.

In the Swedish pre-school, documentation of children’s activity is mandated in the national syllabus, Lpfö -98 (Skolverket, 2010). There are different documentations, both concerning material, e.g. photos, drawings, videos and for different purposes. One kind of documentation which is prominent for different kinds of actors in the pre-school, is the documentation panels of children’s activities posted on the walls (Helm, Beneke & Steinheimer1998; Kline 2008). Such “publications” can be seen as a case for how the pedagogues are interpreting the task of documenting the activity of the children in relation to their educational goals. However, documentation of children is always a social construction, focusing on certain things while excluding (possible) others. The documentation is not only a presentation of what is going on in the daily practice of the pre-school, but a discursive practice in which children are being constructed in different ways (Lenz Taguchi 2010). Our purpose is to explore how constructions of the child are performed indocumentation panelsin Swedish pre-schools. The theoretical framework is taken from post-structural theory and from visual methodology (Rose 2007). The material consists of photographs from documentations from which a selection of documentations has been made. Some preliminary categories are discerned and will be presented in our paper.

Our preliminary findings show that the child is constructed mostly (but not only) in relation to educational goals which are attached to photographs with an accompanying text, constructing the child as e.g. someone who is learning and as someone being socialized as a “good pal”. The documentation panels focus mainly on good examples, i.e. of successful development and with a claim of capturing such a process in the public documentations. Our project is exploring both the local preconditions as well as the local consequences of the increasing accountability in the pre-school sector, and can be regarded as relevant for educational research in Scandinavia.

24. Att styra i namn av framtid

Hedlund, Elisabet

University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Educational Sciences, Education.

The purpose of the dissertation is to problemize the stories about a gradual change and development of education governance. The study objects are steering, constructions of the subject, and disciplinary techniques. The focus is future as a disciplinary technology. Based on the story of a gradual development and change in educational governance three strands were chosen: the late 1970s, the mid-1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. Teacher education was chosen because it is to be found in all educational system. The empirical material consists of policy bills and text designed to create knowledge about teacher education, and text created in the educational community that focus on education and future.

The questions asked relate the study to Foucault´s thinking about governmentality, genealogy, and bio-politics. The essence in governmentality, genealogy and bio-politicis is that that knowledge and knowledge production is a productive activity that generate possibilities that allow us to construct ourselves as subjects.

A general feature in the empirical material is the structure of an overall and collecting concept. The time characteristic become visible through the way that people live, work, and study. The stories create an image of a national and the individual's history, with a present, and a future with possibilities, and restrictions. Those constructions create the contexts that the subject is in and will be a part of. Regardless of story, the question and the task is to organize and provide for the individual as the creator of community, economy, health and future. In the documents it is mainly in the construction of "the other" that the community appears. A hierarchical surveillance was made visible in the tree strands. It can be described as frames in which time is divided into intervals with requirements and objectives possible to examine and document. Confession as a technique for discipline is reused under different names. Confession activities are organized in the pedagogical practices and are referred to as “dialogue pedagogy”, “didactics” and “performance assessment”. Practices were the individual are invited to speak, in a need to speak whit some “other” who “knows” and can act and tutor. The educational practice creates network, actors and audiences who act and communicate with each other simultaneously. The network spreads and demonstrates society's intentions and purposes whit the educational system. The networks and the talk of the future and education create the subjects ways to think and talk about herself and others.

The educational and scientific discourse is part of a political rationality, where functions and practices create ways to coordinate and neutralize differences even though with different names. It is therefore not possible to say that one form of subject construction have been exchanged in benefit of another, it is rather a movement back and forth. The problem is about efficiency, control and to influence the individual's choice, and coordinate individuals in the creation of opportunities for the individual and the nation.

25. Freedom to execute efficiency

Hedlund, Elisabet

University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Educational Sciences, Education.

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the knowledgebase of inclusion and inclusive education and to outline possible consequences that may arise from an educational ideology of inclusion. The thesis describes a potential dilemma that is both theoretical and practical. The dilemma consists of, on the one hand, a need of identification and categorisation of specific groups in society in order to allocate and redistribute available resources, while, on the other hand, there is a need of social recognition of diversity in educational settings in order to achieve social justice and parity of participation. The inclusion of pupils with physical disabilities in the school subject of physical education (PE) is used as a particular example to illustrate a general dilemma. The specific aims were: i) to describe and apply a theoretical framework of ‘social status’ as a possible means of resolving the dilemma (study I); ii) to study PE teachers’ attitudes toward inclusive physical education (studies II and III); and iii) using a case study, to explore the experience of physical education through the eyes of a pupil with a physical impairment and his parents, classmates, PE teachers and personal assistant (study IV). Results show that Swedish PE teachers at primary school level are positive to inclusive PE for pupils with physical disabilities. Factors found to contribute to these positive attitudes were adequate training in inclusive education strategies, supportive school environments and personal resources. In a systematic review of international research PE teachers, in general, were found to have ambivalent attitudes to inclusive PE. This ambivalence was found over cultural borders among the 1200 respondents covered in the 15 articles reviewed and may indicate a latent awareness of the dilemma. Previous experience of having taught PE to pupils with physical disabilities, together with proper education in inclusion, mediated a more positive attitude. The case study of a 10-year-old boy with physical disabilities and significant others in his educational life proved to be a signal example of successful inclusion. Honneth’s three levels of social recognition were used in the analysis. Social recognition at individual, legal and value dimensions is a prerequisite for achieving social justice in inclusive PE settings. Finally, these findings, taken together, indicate a need to address social recognition and redistribution demands simultaneously in order to meet goals of equitable education for pupils with physical disabilities in inclusive PE teaching. Societal (external) and individual factors need to be combined when addressing the issue of social justice in inclusive education. A model of social status, developed by Fraser (2001; 2003), used in conjunction with the notion of plural identities is suggested as a possible resolution to the dilemma described in the thesis.

The purpose of the report (Terms of Reference) is to review national implementation on equality of educational and training opportunities for young people, and in particular the National Strategic Reports of member states from a disability equality perspective in education and training, and provide the Commission with useful evidence in supporting disability policy mainstreaming. Country: Sweden.

31. Swedish Primary School Teachers' attitudes to inclusion

Jerlinder, Kajsa

et al.

University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Educational Sciences, Education.

Danermark, Berth

Institutet för handikappvetenskap, Örebro Universitet.

Gill, Peter

University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Educational Sciences, Education.

Following the discussions of different bully prevention programs in the Swedish schools, the National Agency for Education´s evaluation of bully prevention programs is described. The evaluations have implications for the schools and for the school staff who have a role in the bully prevention groups. Due to the schools' commitment to prevent bullying and discrimination, it is imperative to describe the Swedish context and political climate where the prevention programs are implemented. With a critical social theory perspective, an Action Research [AR] Project was conducted in a midsized Swedish town. Action research is useful when practitioners are to be involved in changing critical issues of their life. AR is political and it is a democratic activity where the researcher uses herself as a democratic tool and strives for a result that leads to more questions and more research. One can say that AR is a powerful tool in order to change and improve with practitioners their own life and workplace.

The aim was to participate in a planned municipal intervention on bullying where the explicit goal was to base the implementation strategy on the best available research. Critical social theory promotes critical thinking and in this study the critical thinking from the participants had been important in order to question bullying and the bullying programs in schools. The project group consisted of four members of staff that work in the municipality and have a connection to the schools.

At the first meeting the group decided to use the survey that The National Agency for Education had used on the students in the schools. This survey is very extensive and it was necessary to reduce it for this purpose but the choice of using it was based on the details of the questions. The group continued to meet and evaluate the steps. Four pedagogical tools were used during the project; the survey to the pupils, the meetings with the principals, the training that was offered to the anti-bullying groups in the schools, and the evaluations of the different steps that was conducted in the project group where thoughts were discussed. The Action Researcher also kept a journal during the process. The result will show the entire process of the Action Research and it will include possible strategies that may contribute to sustainable school health for all pupils.

Definitions of violence vary and are almost always operationalized by the researcher. Perceptions of violence often determine levels of tolerance of violence. Little research has focused on lay definitions. A total of 309 Swedes (78 children, 85 teenagers, 99 younger adults, and 47 adults (30+); 48% male) were interviewed using a specially developed interview protocol. Content analysis was used to assign definitional categories. A folk taxonomy emerged. Immediate physical violence accounted for 73% of all assigned categories. Hit was the word that occurred most frequently. If global physical violence was included, physical violence accounted for 89% of 780 assigned categories. Immediate non-physical violence accounted for 9% and vicarious violence (including media violence) accounted for 2%. Distributions of categories by respondents' gender, age, and participant role in incidents of violence showed the underlying definitions of violence to be extremely stable. The conclusion is that ordinary Swedes share a robust lay definition of violence as a behavior that is immediate, done in close quarters, and physical.

Sweden and The Netherlands. In The Swedish project the teachers are collaboratively developing a way of working with the bully-preventions in the schools. In the Dutch project teachers are designing an educational approach for participation in research between the pupils and their teachers. Both projects are about finding models to organize the co-creation with professionals in the educational context. This paper is focusing on what characteristics are important for co-creation, how these characteristics relate to each other in the process of designing and to the “product” they are developing. Data from the Swedish project consisted in surveys to the participants and the pupils, evaluations from the participants, minutes from the meetings and field notes from the researcher. Data from the Dutch project consisted in ‘one minute papers’ from the participants, minutes from the meetings, interviews with the facilitators and field notes from the researcher. Both projects looked at how the participants connect to each other and to the “product” they are developing. The results show that engagement, shared values, roles and role changes, professional attitude, reflection and knowledge are important when the professionals are engaging in a new product in their own practice. The results show also that time enables them to work with the project. Action Research helps this process by adequate phasing and continuously evaluation, keeping focus on the engagement of all participants and the intended outcomes. A steering group with external support and knowledge can help to sustain the project over time.

The purpose of this paper is to problematize evidence based approaches for understanding mundane teacher-student interaction by showing how education for democracy involves teachers’ handling of dilemmas between goals for promoting students’ personal engagement in controversial issues and to teach for critical thinking; further, I will argue that such knowledge is important for educating teachers to promote students development into a critical democratic participation. A case is taken from a Swedish religious studies classroom chosen from a larger classroom study about teacher student interaction in discussions about controversial issues. The case makes visible the dilemmatic praxis in which the teacher has to use her own judgment in order to promote a qualified democratic participation of the students, which also could be seen as an important part of teacher education. The visibility of such judgments however seems to be excluded in the discourse of evidence based teaching.

If the plural society is in need of interreligious dialogical encounters it is important to study if and in what way(s) educational projects can contribute to this process, and what possibilities and constrains such initiatives are associated with. The focus of this study is therefore on educational projects with a more or less distinct aim to develop interreligious understanding and an attitude of (partly) taking the perspective of the others religious faith. In order to shed light on this issue I have conducted a comparative field study (cf. Broadfoot 2002) of two educational projects in the county of Stockholm, Sweden. One of these projects is located outside school and the other is carried out in classrooms in the Swedish school. By comparing these projects it becomes possible to make “the familiar strange” in each project and to contribute to a discussion of possibilities and constrains in education for interreligious understanding.

The first project is located in an institution specialized in youth projects, many of them aiming for social integration. This project has three leaders representing three religions (Islam, Judaism and Christianity) and youth who are participating on voluntary basis for a (intended) period of three years. The other project is based on a teaching method, where the students assume roles in religious narratives taking from Islamic, Jewish and Christian traditions. By such role taking their predispositions for intercultural and interreligious understanding is intended to increase.

The field study is conducted by interviews with the pedagogical responsible, i.e. youth leaders and teachers, in both projects; three leaders in the youth projects and four teachers in the classroom project. The interviews focus on their intentions for their respective project. By comparing the interviews in each case and between the two cases, the design makes it possible to capture how the actors formulate their goals and to see this in relation to their practical experiences. The approach enables a richer characterization of the projects intentions that is not offered on home pages and in other public presentations and therefore a deeper analysis of them.

The main purpose of my paper is to describe and to compare how the pedagogical responsible understand and communicate the intentions of their projects. Based on an analysis of this, I will also discuss how the intentions of the pedagogical responsible are shaped by the context of their work, and some of the possibilities and constrains that the projects may have for developing interreligious understanding. The paper outlines four main themes: The motivation for their project in relation to the social environment where it is implemented; the notion of learning and development; the approach to similarities and differences and the notion of “dialogue”.

47. Presentation of Swedish data in the REDCO-project

Liljestrand, Johan

University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Educational Sciences, Education.

The purpose of this session is to explore empirically and to discuss theoretically religious studies teachers understanding of religious diversity. In my study of 9 religious study teachers (4 female; 5 male) in the Swedish secondary compulsory school I have found two main approaches to understand religious diversity. One is that different religious traditions are expressions of something common for all humans; e.g. a common human need or a universal ethic manifested as a core in all world religions. The other approach is that different religions are developed in different socio-cultural contexts and responding to different cultural needs. In the second part, the religious studies teachers’ approaches to religious diversity are analyzed in relation to different consequences for acting as citizens in a plural society. In the last part I will outline some possibilities concerning religious pluralism from the perspective of citizenship education.

49. Religiosity and Engagement in Religious Studies

Liljestrand, Johan

University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Educational Sciences, Education.

In Sweden RS (Religious studies) is a mandatory nonconfessional school subject, with the purpose to teach about religions and secular views of life. Such curricular design is connected to the development of Swedish society as one of the most secularized countries in the world with an increasing cultural and religious pluralism. Since school subjects aiming at citizenship education are more or less dependent on students’ engagement, this paper investigates whether such an engagement in RS is dependent on students’ religious vis-a-vis a secular orientation to life. The purpose of this paper is to investigate engagement for Swedish RS among religiously and non-religiously engaged groups of students in the Swedish secondary school. Eight items from the REDCO II questionnaire were used in this study. The result partly supported former studies on this subject. In the concluding section some didactic issues are discussed on the experience of religiously engaged students.

50. Swedish national church as a (questioned) actor in the multi-religious society

Liljestrand, Johan

University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Educational Sciences, Education.

Sweden as most other countries in Europe can be characterized as a multi-cultural and multi-religious society. One of the most prominent actors in inter-religious relations is the Swedish national church. However, such involvement can also be subject for public criticism and debate. Different expectations concerning cooperation with the Swedish Muslim community became visible in the public media and in national church media when an assembly in Stockholm decided to hire an imam in a multi-religious youth project. This media case highlights social tensions on the national level as well as within the church, concerning the role of the national church as an actor in the interreligious society. The purpose of this contribution is to analyse this debate with a focus on the arguments used by the debaters. A second purpose is to analyse how the young people are portrayed in this debate. The material is based on articles in Swedish public media and Swedish national church media during Mars to September 2011. The debate mainly focuses on the borders for what should be included and excluded by a national church in a multi-religious society.